


Recreant Knight

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Mention of Xenophobia, mention of historical homophobia, mention of suicide, small town England, unholy rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:20:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29274582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A knight and a goddess take a bus out of town.
Relationships: Female paladin / Incarnation of her goddess
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6, anonymous





	Recreant Knight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sombregods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sombregods/gifts).



Ella met the knight on her nineteenth birthday, down at the bus stop. The knight was tall and thin and wearing shining plate armour that burned with blue fire at the joins. Her helmet covered her face completely, except for a slit for the eyes. She was standing alone at the bus stop in the grainy light of an autumn evening, next to the poster for Vitajuice Ultra Water and the map of local bus routes. A plume of blue fire rose from her helmet and streamed out, gently, in the wind. Despite the cool neon gloss the fire gave it, her armour was quite well worn, with the silky brushed finish of earnest polishing and the odd dint here and there. 

Ella noticed all this as she walked up to the bus stop and took her place beside the knight, who turned and made as if to kneel. 

“Please don’t,” said Ella. 

The knight stopped, and rose back up to her full height with a faint creak of fire and metal. Ella’s small hope of her being a hallucination of some sort ebbed considerably.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I’m here to engage in a birthday tradition. What’s your excuse?”

“I am here to protect and serve you,” said the knight. Above them, the streetlight flickered on, casting a juddering lozenge of orange light down through the half-dark. It clashed with the blue flame. 

“I don’t need either of those things,” said Ella. “Thank you.”

“But I am here to serve you, nonetheless.”

“Well, I’m here to engage in the birthday tradition of running away,” said Ella. “I don’t suppose you can serve me in relation to that?”

“I can accompany you,” said the knight. Her voice was clear and strong, with a faint rasp to it at the edges, as if it hadn’t been used for a while. It also sounded just slightly quizzical. That had to be an illusion, though. Flaming paladins were probably always in deadly earnest.

Ella frowned. Now that she thought about it, there _was_ meant to be a knight, wasn't there? She stared out down the darkening road, dredging up half-remembered lessons. A sleeper woken, when it was due time. A paladin to serve the Lady of the Valley. To serve her. Like the sacrifice and the Well and the whole being-a-goddess thing, this was probably a done deal. She shrugged. “I can’t exactly stop you.” 

To her relief, the knight didn’t respond by assuring her that she would absolutely be able to stop anything she pleased, once she truly took up her divine mantle and brought news of the goddess to the world beyond Greenhampton, as was certainly destined to happen at some point, exact timing to be determined, praise to the Lady, amen.

She just nodded creakily, and stood beside Ella, burning blue, until the bus came.

The bus driver didn’t seem to notice that the knight was a knight at all. He charged her seventeen-fifty for a single to Oxford, just the same as Ella, and when the knight, after much searching and clanking, finally produced a single large silver coin that wasn’t legal tender in the slightest, he didn’t notice that either. He just looked long-suffering at how long she had taken, and set the bus rattling off through Greenhampton, past an array of neatly-clipped hedges, lawns, and houses. Inside the houses, Ella knew, there would be neatly clipped haircuts, as well, with neatly clipped minds inside the haircuts. Minds that were made to worship her, and her alone. That was what Greenhampton, the town and the place and the people, was for.

Ella made her way to the back seat of the bus, nodding to Mrs Bancroft from the post-office and Mr Khan from the antique shop as she went. They didn’t notice the knight, either. But both of them did bow to her, deep and sincere. They lived in Greenhampton, after all.

The knight followed her and sat creakily down a couple of places along from her on the back row. Then, with more creaking and grating, her blue fire burning pallid as a gas burner under the fluorescent lights of the bus, she shuffled up closer to Ella.

Ella braced herself for the divine mantle spiel.

“Do you know,” the knight began.

Ella closed her eyes.

“Do you know that they charge seventeen whole pounds for a bus journey?” The knight sounded absolutely scandalised. “I mean, of course you do. You paid. But, still. Seventeen whole pounds.”

“And fifty pence,” Ella reminded her, opening her eyes again.

“Which doesn’t even make sense. You’ve changed the currency, haven’t you. 'Fifty pence.' You're doing it in tens. Decimal.” The knight sounded faintly accusatory.

“Well, it wasn’t me personally.”

“Father says that new-fangled ideas like that are what lost Britain our proper place in the world,” said the knight solemnly. “Said, I mean. He’s probably long dead by now.”

Ella found that she couldn’t look the knight in the helmet. Her parents had died before she could even remember, and she still managed to miss them. She stared down at her feet, in their battered trainers, and at the knight’s feet in their plate mail. The knight had spurs, which clinked whenever the bus went over a pothole. “Sorry,” she said. 

“Oh, don’t be,” said the knight chirpily. “He was a simply horrible man. Even Mum said so.” Her spurs clinked. “I hope he’s still here. After Mum died, he made sure she was buried in Greenhampton, despite her express wishes. I hope he’s here as well, still bound to serve.”

Ella looked up. The knight was sitting next to her, swaying serenely, with her glowing reflection in the window swaying beyond her in the night. 

“Being bound to serve is a beautiful thing,” said the knight. “Father said that a lot. He said it was all right for there to be a lady knight, as well, because of tradition and because of Joan of Arc, even if she was a Frenchie.”

“Er,” said Ella. “Right.”

“Mum said that Father’s approach to life revealed the stifling effects of a small-town upbringing, and that worshipping a pagan goddess didn’t make him any more interesting, and that if she could go back in time she would never leave Basingstoke,” said the knight. “As long as she could take me with her. When she went back in time. If she could. She said that, as well.”

“Your mum sounds nice,” said Ella, despite herself. This was some sort of trick or test, she knew. When they got back, the knight would recite every treasonous word she’d said in front of the congregation, and she would tell them every word Ella had said. And the Rev. Hampton would sigh and ask Ella if she truly understood her duties. And if she said no, she would spend some time in the Well.

“She was,” the knight said fervently.

It sounded so convincing. Ella sighed, and stretched her feet out. The bus stopped with a rattle to let off Mr. Khan, and the open doors let in a curl of chill autumn air. 

“Are the Beatles still around?” asked the knight. “Just out of interest?” She sounded as if she was trying very hard to not sound particularly interested.

“They split up,” said Ella. “Sorry.” Now probably wasn’t the time to break it to the knight about John Lennon.

“Oh. Did we land on the Moon? Are there space stations on the Moon? Did we get to Mars?”

“We sent some robots to Mars. Nothing on the moon, sorry. We did land there, though, ages ago. Some Americans did.”

“I see the world didn’t get blown up.”

“Not yet.” Ella kicked her feet out. “I mean, there’s still time.”

“And then I will stand by your side as you usher in a new age of plenty, Oh Lady of the Green Waters,” said the knight. “Of course.”

“Of course.” Outside the window, the streetlights had gone. They were driving through fields, between the wooded valley walls. She turned to the knight. “You’ve been asleep for a while, huh?”

“Waiting for you. It’s inconvenient that we don’t always get born at the same time. Father said it was better for me to enter the Sleep of the Paladin rather than get old and useless by the time you arrived. He never got to see you, did he?”

“Nope. If he was grown-up in the sixties, he would have been dead by the time I was born.”

“Good.”

Ella looked out of the window again. They were coming up to the cut through the chalk, where the road went straight through the hills surrounding Greenhampton valley. “It won’t be long now.”

“Until you usher in the age of She Who Walks the Valley?”

“No, until we have to get off the bus.” Ella sighed. “Just you wait and see.”

“I thought you bought a ticket to Oxford?”

“Yeah. But it won’t work. It never does. No matter where I’m going.”

“What do you mean? You can’t get out of the valley?”

Ella nodded. “That’s why it’s a birthday tradition,” she said. “I try every year.” She patted the bag beside her. It had even more money in it than usual, this year. She’d raided the Greenhampton Church Restoration Fund. After all, she was the only divinity ever worshipped in the church, so it was pretty much hers anyway.

“Happy birthday? I mean, felicitations, My Lady of the Green Furrows.”

“Yeah, thanks.” The bus began to groan and shake, the way it always did. “Here we go.”

Ahead of them, the gap in the valley walls showed straight and narrow, a neat wedge removed from the dark wooded rise. The sky beyond it was a paler dark against the black of the woods. Somewhere out there was the motorway, and cities and universities and shops where people didn’t bow when you came in. Places where nobody sacrificed themselves when you turned sixteen, so that you could wake and know your awful nature. Places without a Well.

The little petrol station was showing up as well, glowing small and square under the slope of the hill. Ella had spent a large chunk of her birthday in that petrol station, ever since she first started trying to leave, back when she was seven years old. Back then, she hadn’t even really known she was the goddess yet. She had just hated the vicar, and all the other people she had to live with, and the Well. She had hated a lot of things. That was all right, though, the Rev. Hampton said. Her hate was a holy gift, and come the day and the hour, she would bestow it upon the unfaithful world. 

The bus shuddered to a stop in the petrol station forecourt. Smoke was coming up past the front windscreen. 

“It broke down,” the knight observed.

“It always does. Sorry, Mrs Bancroft,” Ella called out. “I’ve interrupted your journey.”

Mrs Bancroft turned round in her seat and bowed. “It’s an honour, My Lady of the Green Waters,” she said cheerfully. “I was only off to see my youngest in Uphampton, anyway.”

“Well, sorry all the same.” Ella threaded her way down the bus. “Sorry I broke it,” she told the bus driver.

“You have blessed us, My Lady of the Hollows,” he told her. “I’ve already rung the vicar. He’s on his way to pick you up.”

“Is he, now?” Ella engaged in a bit of divine pettiness, even though she knew it might mean the Well. The vicar had woken up her paladin, after all. He’d even had the gall to make her knight funny and nice, which meant it would be particularly traumatic when she started displaying her true loyalty to the Green Lady and her dissatisfaction with the Lady’s current earthly incarnation. This birthday was even worse than normal. So she felt back along the deep chalk swell and dip of the valley, to where the Rev. Hampton’s Toyota was just coming around the bend over the Greenwater Stream. Pale new roots came out in the Toyota’s engine, giving him just enough time to brake before the front of the car erupted in writhing, twining rootlets, searching for the earth. It wouldn’t take him long to call for backup, of course, but it would stall him for now. And, more importantly, it would really piss him off. He loved that car.

The knight came down from the bus after her, and looked around. “We really are in the future,” she observed. “Everything’s different. All rounded at the edges. And such interesting colours.” It sounded as if she was trying hard to be polite.

“Not that different,” said Ella gloomily. “They’ll be along to pick me up in a bit. You’ll have to wait.”

“What would happen if you walked off through the gap in the valley? Along the road?”

“I’d keep walking. I’d just never get any further than the middle of the cutting.” Ella had tried it, one year. She’d walked until the soles of her feet were raw. Nothing had changed. The chalk walls of the cutting had risen up on either side like rotten cheese, ragged with little bushes and clinging harebells. Cars had gone past. The Rev. Hampton had come to pick her up, after a while. That had probably been the worst birthday of all, up till now.

“You can get up to the top of the hills, though?” The knight’s voice was suddenly sharp. “To the Barrow?”

“Yeah, sure.” Ella had tried that, as well, of course. Going over the hills rather than through them. Up where the Barrow and the Stones guarded the ridge. She’d got nothing from that but a nice view of places she couldn’t get to, and the voices of the Greenhampton dead from where they wailed around the rim of the valley, wanting to get out. Serving the Lady of the Furrows forever and ever obviously palled, after a while.

“Good,” said the knight brightly. “Because we’ll be going up there shortly.”

Ella stared at her. The knight’s blue fire was burning pale in the lemon-fresh light of the petrol station. The air smelled of benzene and burnt-out bus engine. Around them, the hills rose up, high and dark. The Barrow was up there, right above them, near the cutting. But it certainly wasn’t on her usual birthday itinerary. “What makes you say that?” she asked. Was this some new horrible ceremony, like the sacrifices when she was sixteen? But those had taken place in the church, under the macaroni pictures of her made by the schoolchildren and the harvest festival marrows. They didn’t use the barrow and the circle much anymore. They were uncivilised, the Rev. Hampton said, and anyway there were accessibility issues.

“I should probably fill you in a little,” the knight went on. “But do you think we could go inside the shop, first? I really, really want to see what all that food is.”

The little shop attached to the petrol station was definitely a hit. Ella spent some of the Church Restoration Fund on an armful of rustling junk food and two dribbly cappuccinos from the coffee machine. The young man behind the counter sighed and ignored them. Not a Greenhampton local. You could always tell.

“These are so neat.” The knight was rifling through packets of Haribo. “These ones are shaped like fried eggs!”

“You can eat some, if you want.” Ella hopped up on one of the stools next to the gurgling coffee machine, looking out over a view of petrol pumps, smoking bus, and dark valley. “I bought you a coffee, as well.”

“Thank you!” The knight sounded so genuinely excited it was hard to believe she was faking. “I always wanted to go to a proper coffee bar.”

Ella looked around at the racks of magazines, the junk food and the refrigerated sandwiches. “I don’t think this qualifies.” Then she looked at the knight’s visor. “I could see if they have a straw?”

“No, it’s fine.” The knight levered off her helmet, with some clinking and fiddling, and set it down on the counter in front of them. Underneath the helmet, she turned out to be raw-boned and freckled, with sandy hair that looked as if it had spent the last half-century and more trying hard to come out of its plaits. She definitely wasn’t much older than Ella herself. “I probably don’t look like you imagined,” she said ruefully. 

“I’m not sure I was imagining anything,” said Ella slowly. The knight was sort of hot. She could handle that. But she also looked blazingly, achingly honest. A lie would float across that wide freckled face like a hot air balloon. Ella thought back to everything the knight had said so far, and felt hope begin to uncurl deep in her stomach, like a root. She tried hard to squash it back down.

“I always wanted to look like Bardot, or Claudia Cardinale, or someone stunning like that,” the knight was saying. “There was one girl in the year above me at Greenhampton High who was a dead ringer for Julie Christie. I had the most horrible pash on her, but I wanted to look like her as well. You know how it is?”

“You had a crush on a girl?”

“Oh, lots of us did. Of course, it was just a phase. You grow out of it. Naturally.”

“I don’t. I just like girls. The crush sort of like. Not planning to grow out of it any time soon.” Ella considered trying to explain half a century of LGBT struggles to someone from the sixties, and gave up. “It’s not so much of a thing, nowadays. Not always, anyway.”

“Not so much of a thing?” The knight’s voice was very dry and strained. For a horrible moment Ella thought she might be about to cry.

“It’s okay,” she tried, patting the knight’s armoured shoulder tentatively. Blue fire came up around her fingers. “I mean, it isn’t, but nowadays things are better. For girls who have, er, pashes on other girls. Or more than pashes. Whatever. There was a whole social movement, and everything.” She gave the armour another pat. “Have some coffee.”

The knight had some coffee. Then she had some gummy worms. Then she had some Doritos. By the time she was working her way through a packet of Tangfastics, she’d cheered up.

“Right,” she said. “The food of the future is beautiful and tingly, even if it does leave a funny taste in your mouth. But it’s not so bad for a last meal, all things considered.”

“A last meal?”

The knight picked up her helmet and gazed into its empty eye slit. “I’ve been laying a geas on you since I first spoke to you, Lady of the Furrows,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”

“A geas?”

“Mum taught me. She taught me a lot of things, before she died, you know. Active coven they have in Basingstoke. And she did some research of her own, once she discovered Greenhampton was the way it is. There's a lot you can do with a willing witch and a born knight, you know.”

“So, what? You planned with her to bring me down, once you became my paladin?” Ella shook her head. “Sorry, but you’re sworn to protect me. Born to protect me. Whatever. That’s the deal. You said so yourself.”

“I know. And I know I said so, although that was before you started seeming almost like a normal person.” The knight held a lucent green gummy worm up to the light. “I know the consequences for going against my destiny. I said this was a last meal. And if you really aren’t trying to trick me into thinking you’re actually pretty decent, then I’m sorry to you, Lady of the Green Waters. But you’re going to come up with me to the Barrow, and I’m going to end you, all the same.”

“You’re the one who’s been trying to trick me by seeming almost like a normal person,” Ella objected. Her feet were carrying her out of the petrol station shop, she noticed. Behind them, abandoned on the counter among drifts of Haribo packets, the knight's helmet regarded them mournfully.

“Maybe we’re both normal people,” the knight said. “But you’re still the Lady of the Well.”

They were crossing the forecourt, past the bus with the driver and Mrs Bancroft snoozing in their seats, past the road, past the fields. They were heading for the slope of the valley. For the Barrow.

“My name is Ella,” said Ella. “And I hate the Well. They put me in it, you know. Down under the water, in the church crypt. To bless it. I suppose that’s a geas, as well. Letting them do it. Like how they keep me in the valley.” She stumbled, in the dark, and felt for her phone, stabbing for the torch. It lit up a ring of rough grass around them, shocking green. "The vicar didn't send you, after all, did he?"

"No. I woke up on my own."

Ella bit her lip. She wasn't dealing with one of the vicar's minions. This wasn't a trick. This really was a true and perfect knight, even if she was on some kind of suicide mission to put Ella down. "What's your name?"

“I’m Flora,” said the knight. “Pleased to meet you, Ella. It’s a bit much to hope for no hard feelings, I suppose, but this isn’t personal. I’m doing this for my mum, and even for Greenhampton. No place should need to sacrifice people just to wake up a goddess who never even brings about the end of the world, as advertised. No offence.”

“None taken.” Ella shrugged. “I couldn’t do that, anyway. I can do stuff with roots and trees and growing things. I guess I was once a harvest goddess, or something? But all the bollocks about the new age of She Who Walks, and all that – that’s not me. They still believe it, though.”

“Oh.” The knight strode on, her blue fire shining off the smooth trunks of beeches. They were into the woods. “Still. Sorry, Ella. Maybe I’m just doing this for me, after all.”

“I get that.” Ella raised her hand. Under them, roots began to move. “I understand, Flora. Also, I said I could do stuff with plants, didn’t I?”

“What?” Flora looked down, and then she tried to run. But it was too late. The roots had her fast, climbing up her legs like fat quick snakes. 

“I just want to talk.” Ella found she could hold herself back from moving forward, as long as Flora was staying still herself. “I have a proposition.”

“I don’t know how people do things nowadays,” said Flora, struggling, “but even though you’re really pretty, you just tied me up with a tree.”

“Not like that.” Ella pushed down the brief thought that maybe it could be like that, and forged on. “You’re planning to kill me, or something, right?”

“Right.”

“But I’ll just come back. I always do. Every few generations, here in the valley. And the harvests grow heavy and the furrows grow fat, and nowadays that doesn’t really matter because our main industry is tourism and the call centre over in Uphampton, but whatever. People drink of the Well, and prosper. I come and I stay and I make it so. What if you made it so I didn’t? Or at least so that I didn’t come back in the same place? What if you broke the geas keeping me to the valley?”

“You want me to set you free?”

“I already said I couldn’t end the world if I wanted to. Hell, maybe I wasn’t meant to be tied to Greenhampton in the first place. I hate it here.”

“I’d be free, then, as well.” Flora sounded as if she was testing the words out. “I wouldn’t get born to protect you, over and over. Or maybe I would, but it wouldn’t be here.”

“It wouldn’t be here. Can you do it? Plus - bonus! You won't have to die. You'll still be protecting me. In fact, you'll be protecting me really well. Just against Greenhampton, not for it.” Ella held up her phone, casting its light on Flora’s face. It really was an honest sort of face. She could tell the moment Flora decided.

"Mum planned all this," she said slowly. "But then, she did also tell me to get out and be happy."

"I said she sounded nice." 

"And you did buy me a coffee."

"It was actually a really bad coffee," Ella admitted. "You can get better ones."

"Will they still have the sweet chocolate stuff on top?"

Ella nodded. "You can also have cinnamon."

The blue fire rose up from Flora's armour and rippled through the beech trees, adding the scent of ozone to the smell of leaf mould and wet. Some of Ella's roots fell away.

Flora brushed herself off, then gave a short, sharp nod. “If I use the power we were planning to unleash to undo you – then, yes. Yes. I think I can. Let me out of these.”

Ella let the roots drop.

“You’re really not going to end the world?”

“Would you really care if I did?”

Flora considered. “I wouldn’t much care if you ended Greenhampton, but I want to go to a coffee bar and buy a lot of new albums and see if you’ve just been feeding me a load of rubbish about how the future really is.”

“I haven’t been! Everything I said was true.”

“Even the bit about girls who like other girls?” Under the dark, smooth trees, Flora’s face, lit up by flickering fire, was very young and open and afraid.

“Especially that,” said Ella, and took her mailed hand. “The only thing is that now we call coffee bars 'Starbucks'.”

“O Brave New World,” said Flora, a little wryly. But she didn’t pull her hand away.

\--

The Barrow was dark and humped and long between the trees, with an opening in it at one end between tall stones like a mouth. Around it, the Stones rose up, gnarled and pale in the light of Ella’s torch and Flora’s fire. Behind them, the valley lay dark and still, the lights of Greenhampton shining down in the middle of it like coins in a wishing well.

Clouds moved across the sky. The night was wearing on.

“The vicar will be coming for me,” Ella said. “They all will, as soon as they realise that this isn't like all the other times. We need to move fast.” 

“Fine.” Flora’s voice was clipped and businesslike, with just the edge of a tremor. “Come inside. My humble abode, so to speak.”

The inside of the Barrow was quiet and calm and smelt of earth. The neatly-fitted stones rose up around them, smoothed by years and years of long-gone fingertips. Dark chambers branched off to either side. Out of the wind, there was only the silence of the hills, the chalk stretching underneath them like the ghost of ancient seas. Ella could feel it. She could feel Flora too, gathering power. She really was a rather strong witch on her own account, Ella could tell. And of course, she was using the power of the Lady's Knight. At least it was being good for something, after all these many years and many Knights.

They reached the innermost chamber, stooping, their voices sounding wide and hollow in the dark. Wind sighed behind them, past the opening. The dead were here. Ella could feel them.

“This was where I slept, you know,” Flora said conversationally. “Waiting for you.”

“I’m glad you did,” Ella said, and then felt enormously awkward. 

“So am I,” said Flora, looking back over her shoulder, her smile lit with blue fire.

Ella smiled back.

Then Flora bowed her head. "This is where mum set the geas, you know." Her voice was gentle, as if she wasn't talking to Ella at all. "She must have known then that she wasn't getting out. Not back in time. Not back to Basingstoke. Not anywhere."

"Once I can leave," said Ella, "everyone can." She clenched her fists in the pockets of her hoodie, and tried very hard to believe this was true.

Flora nodded. "Don't worry. It will all be over soon. You'll be free."

Ella knew that she wasn't talking to her.

In the end, lifting the geas that kept Ella locked in the valley was easy. Flora’s mother must have poured most of her magic into the stones of the Barrow. And both the goddess of the valley and her faithful knight were there, wishing it on. Power like that was good for a lot.

Flora raised it in the shape of a burning sword, and cut down. The dull stone altar at the heart of the Barrow, in its deepest, most secret room, trembled and broke.

Ella felt it go. She felt the pull of the valley go, too. The world opened up around her like a rose.

Great waves of chalk, bobbing with flint, and clay and sand and sandstone and schist. Granite and quartz. Old forests of coal. Busy with roads, strung out with carbon. The soil streaked and sopping with nitrogen run-off. Growing and groaning with shrivelling forests, flat fields of wheat, flourishes of organophosphate. The whole world.

"This is for you, mum," said Flora, and laid down her sword. It wavered like a candle flame, bending towards her, and died down.

“She’d be proud of you,” said Ella, afterwards, taking Flora’s hand.

“I hope so,” said Flora. Her armour flickered and went out. 

“I know so,” said Ella. “Now, let’s get out of here.” She hefted her bag of stolen money, and led the way out of the low chambered passage, running her fingers along the dry smooth stone.

Outside, the wind sighed through the beeches. The sun was coming up. The dead were streaming away, out and up through the trees. Greenhampton was emptying out.

Down in the valley, Ella could feel people beginning to stir, like a poked anthill. The Rev. Hampton would know, by now. The Well would be running dry. No longer would they hand its water out every Sunday, blessing the townsfolk, marking those next in line for sacrifice with the fruit of her drowning.

But that wasn’t any of her business, not any more. “Are you ready?” she asked.

Flora tipped her face up to the lightening sky. “I’m definitely ready to get some new clothes,” she said. “And, yes, I’m ready. Come on.” She took Ella’s hand, and squeezed. “I’m going to test everything you said,” she said. “Just so you know. Everything.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Ella, hoping her grin wasn’t too visible in the grey dawn light.

And, hand in hand, they crossed over the brow of the hill, out of the valley.


End file.
